Galvanising Venus: confessions from my holy of holies
This article deals with research I am doing for a project that has been ongoing for around six years. I am finally in a place as an artist where I can treat the story properly. I won’t be discussing the story here in too much detail, but my thought process that brought me to an understanding of the thesis of the show. Bear with me, I get to the musical theatre eventually, but the stuff about art is important. I am writing this post to consolidate my thoughts and to archive today’s research for future reference. I hope it might be of interest to somebody out there. who is thinking about the same subject. This may particularly be of interest to radical Christians, Buddhists, nihilists, humanists, progressives, libertarians and also probably to psychopaths. You’re all welcome here.
Above is a photograph of Clemente Susini’s ‘Venerina’ or ‘Little Venus’ from 1782, housed in the Poggi Palace, Bologna. It is one of a number of anatomical Venuses used to teach anatomy without the ethical and practical difficulties of finding cadaver after cadaver. It is rendered in wax and the anatomic detail is simply astonishing.
Today has been a day of Venuses. I am tempted to write ‘Veni’ as the plural of that; ‘veni’ is, of course, ‘I came’ in Latin. I didn’t, by the way; Give me Eros over Aphrodite any day.*
That wasn’t intended as a puerile joke. At the time of creation these Venuses weren’t solely pedagogic tools, they were also pornographic tableux. The audience for them was chiefly male with occasional showings for ladies but a general attitude of ‘they don’t need to learn anything except how not to burn my breakfast’. These Venuses were aimed at men. The classical subject has long been used as an excuse to feed the male gaze, and it’s interesting to consider the ratio of mythological depictions of nude females to nude males. (Caravaggio, Michelangelo and - likely - Leonardo are all discounted on account of their homosexuality.) Michael Sappol has this to say: ‘ [B]eginning in the 1830s and intensifying in succeeding decades, there arose a variety of anatomical entrepreneurs, eager to cultivate, exploit, and cater to the audience for anatomy through anatomical museums and exhibits, and from the outset...anatomy was assimilated to the purposes of satisfying and profiting from the demand for sexual material, to its critics pornography.’
Venus being made in the 1780s, this pre-dates such a movement, but it may well have served as inspiration. This is how this Venus is described on the website of the Palazzo: ‘The agony of a young woman is represented in her last instant of life as she abandons herself to death voluptuously and completely naked. The thorax and abdomen can be opened, allowing the various parts to be disassembled so as to simulate the act of anatomic dissection.’ It goes on to describe the alienating effect of the ‘rough and repulsive’ anatomical detail juxtaposed against a ‘harmonic’ and ‘supple sensuousness’. The latter, her morbidezza quality, is down to the use of beeswax and animal fat which has a fleshly realism that modern waxwork cannot capture. The pose also contributes to this sensuality: her head may be thrown back in agony, but the ambiguity between expressions of extreme pleasure and pain leave the question hanging more than the Palazzo might care to admit, at least publicly.
She wears pearls. Her legs are animated as though in movement and movement is implied by the disturbed sheets of her bed. She has human hair on her head. She has a bold, black bush. And, of course, she conforms to long-established norms of Florentine beauty. None of this is necessary to her function. Did Susini intend to make her so sexy? Possibly. He certainly intended to make her beautiful and when dealing with the human form the two aren’t always easy to distinguish.
These anatomical Venuses captured my attention because I have been working on a musical project about a pathologist who, after faking his death and assuming a new identity and taking a new wife, is shocked to discover his ex-wife on the slab bearing the message: ’Naughty boy’. In the husband’s traumatised imagination she springs to life and serves both as the narrator of his paranoia as he desperately tries to discover who sent the message, and as a symbol of something unfinished, a sense of all-consuming regret and an unhealthy obsession with the immutable past.
This story began as a straight play (of extremely dubious quality) that I wrote while at sixth-form college. It was shelved for a long time, but I couldn’t get the image of the husband cutting up his true love out of my mind. There was something inescapably delightful about how a post-mortem might, in this context, become a sublimation of sexuality, especially if done with a caring sensuousness. The quasi-sexual union of external and internal, and the scope for a highly-stylised, aesthetic depiction of gore and violence played on my mind on-and-off for over half a decade, but crystallised in the image of the anatomical Venus: I am not alone in observing some parallel between the female anatomical model and the male sexual gaze.
There are many holes at the centre of the work, many of which will be filled in soon by thorough research into the process of the post-mortem and the environment of the mortuary. But there was something hollow at the centre of the show that kept stopping me in my tracks: WHY does the world need to see a parallel between the post-mortem and sex? After all, Susini was not trying to make some clever point about sublimated sexuality ‘on the slab’, he was most-likely just reflecting - consciously or unconsciously - something about the time and culture in which he lived. (See here for an examination of the cultural and theological connotations of the anatomical Venus). Was my obsession with this parallel more than a desire to shock? I wanted to shock my audience, but I knew there was more I was trying to do than simply shock people: I wanted to make a statement about something true to me that I think is true to others (if not universal) but under-explored. The closest thing I had found to that (whatever it was - I didn’t know then) was in the aestheticisation of violence in Thomas Harris’ Hannibal novels which I have long thought of as ‘my story’ in a sort of oblique way, though I couldn’t quite place why. But it was about more than a shared interest in haute cuisine and the harpsichord.
And that brings me on to timing. I have recently grown very interested in principles of Open Space as an approach to collaboration and believe many of the principles are indicative of the general attitude one should have when working alone, and one of those is: whatever time something happens is the right time for it to happen. And yesterday the conditions were right for everything to fall into place.
I had given myself the day off from all projects, so naturally I resumed research for this so-far-on-the-back-burner project around 18 hours ago by trying to hunt down a pathologist or mortuary technician who could tell me precise details about not only how a post-mortem is carried out, but what observations are made when, how these are recorded, and - importantly - who has access to bodies and at what hours because my character needs to be alone with the body in two crucial moments of the narrative. This research led me to discovering the anatomical Venus. That led me to the work of Mark Dery who wrote an excellent article about her. (In fact, much of this post is derived from his observations and some of his points I have directly lifted.) Dery is currently writing a book about the ‘Pathological Sublime’.
And then it hit me: what I am trying to say in this piece has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the Pathological Sublime and how we relate to our ‘dark’ sides. Unfortunately, I did not know of the concept before or I could have forgone the endless pacing that has all but destroyed my lounge rug. (I don’t actually have a rug in my lounge but if I did it would have all but disappeared anyway, so it’s the same difference.)
The sex is simply a device to highlight the uncomfortable paradox of delight and horror we experience when confronted with images of the grotesque. I have never felt cognitive dissonance about anything (though a priest once insisted that I should, as if that was going to change anything) and I have often kept multiple sets of books regarding my personal identity. The thrill of violent imagery is no exception. I have always openly delighted in observing the worst of mankind and have never felt any need to adopt a moral standpoint about this. I simply observe. It is worth saying that, to my knowledge, I am not a sociopath. I feel compassion, am moved deeply by music, art and drama, and have felt overwhelming love towards others. And I write stories because I want to understand others. Yet I also get a kick - not quite a sadistic kick but definitely pleasure - out of viewing extreme violence and studying suffering both real and fictional, though I stress not from causing it, which is quite against my nature. I know that sounds concerning but I just do not understand the root of that concern: what you like is what you like, so what is the point of beating yourself up about it? I suppose the beating up cannot be helped; you can either compartmentalise such things or you can’t. I am not defined by my dark obsessions but they are a part of my identity and because I do not believe it is healthy or necessary to challenge those parts of it (Fthe not-challenging it is an important part of my identity, too) my identity as a whole (if it is a whole... is anyone’s?) is somewhat at a tangent to public opinion.
What Dery argues so eloquently is that we all have a desire to look at the things that horrify us. We are, as human beings, drawn to those things that are so horrific we cannot properly comprehend them. Instead we are forced to consider the intensity of our own rapture. In an article of his, Dery criticises Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ for its ‘moral ponderousness, her ever-present sense of her own gravitas, [which] crushes flat the subversive glee in Thinking Bad Thoughts and Looking at Forbidden Things that I believe is essential to free thought.’
Well said, Mark! It seems to me that what unites Hannibal; The Pathological Sublime and what I am trying to achieve, is a polemic against that moral ponderousness that many people adopt when they are being watched watch suffering. So often people express their repulsion histrionically but their fascination not at all. In Harris’ novels we are made to like Lecter: he is cultured, suave, polite, extremely considerate and has a very mordant sense of irony that one can’t help but admire. All blurbs on these books say he is a ‘chilling’ character, but for me he’s just a breath of fresh air and the narrator is pretty non-judgemental. Yes it IS funny and intellectually satisfying to disembowel and hang a Pazzi from the Palazzo Vecchio after lecturing on the topic to the studiolo. Yes, it IS poetic and satisfyingly economical to feed someone their own brain and then use the cavity afterwards as a bin for the leftovers. Why shouldn’t that be the reader’s response? Harris sets you up to enjoy those things and people do. And they love the character as the launch of a third TV series demonstrates. (I personally find all of the food porn and food gorn rather masturbatory but I’ve never denied myself those kinds of pleasures so I’m an avid fan!) See the glorious plate below with its funereal purple flower and blackberries. As a little aside: post-revolutionary Frenchies used to throw lugubrious feasts of only black food in memory of the dead. I understand they were quite unpleasant to actually eat.
And what about the bone-like off-white of that round thing on the left? And what the hell is it?
The books, films and TV show all feed (no pun intended) into a very similar aesthetic to the anatomical Venus. Hannibal goes to Florence which is where the anatomical Venus of 1790 (and many others) is housed at La Specola. Anatomy and butchery differ only in their detail and their purposes but either way you’re learning where body bits are so you can hack at them accurately. And there is no danger of moral ponderousness in Hannibal’s playful approach to murder and cannibalism. Publicly people are shocked by cannibalism, but if you say, ‘ if it were put in front of me I’d give it a go’ it is staggering how many people will enthusiastically agree as though they have just been waiting for someone to give them permission to say it. Is it such a leap from foie-gras or veal to human beings? In fact, at a genetic level, is it such a leap from pigs to people? And do we really need to be scared of that? A fine line is still a line.
The thetic point of Harris’ books and Dery’s current research is that thinking bad thoughts and looking at dark stuff is human. We enjoy it and we don’t have to make that morally complicated.
Thus I now know the thesis of the show. The character’s journey is about regret and not appreciating what you have when you have it, but the message to the audience is about the danger of repression, the ugliness of moral pretence and the value of insight and honesty with oneself.
If I have any quality of genius (and heaven knows I’m not short of vanity in that respect) it is that I can empathise with the victims of terrible atrocities and in the next breath dispense with emotive terms like ‘terrible’ and see it completely and utterly from the perpetrator’s point of view. We must, yes, preserve an intellectual morality and act upon our desire to help others. But we must also evolve out of the kind of civilisation that causes mobs to form outside of the houses of paedophiles, the kind of society that calls for murderers themselves to be killed, and the ridiculous internalisation of the idea of thought crime that leads to the self-flagellation and self-loathing that perpetuate violence and suffering. Humanity is a sham if there isn’t the application of understanding and compassion to the ‘wicked’, and to those parts of ourselves that we hide and punish out of fear of being thought of as such,either by others or by ourselves. In this show the evil (take a pinch of salt) is not to be found in the necrophilia, the deception, the fraud, the murder or the sadomasochism. Rather, the horrible tragedy at the centre of the story is that the protagonist gets so terrified at being ‘outed’ as wicked and so hell-bent on keeping up appearances that he does the one truly wicked thing in the story: he ignores his new wife who loves him and needs his attention. Evil is not glamorous like it is in Hannibal (though that is not to say it cannot or should not be glamorised for the purposes of entertainment). Neither is it embodied by serial killers and child rapists who through a rare but fatal combination of genetics, upbringing and neurology are doomed to cause harm to others.
Evil (yes, let’s keep using the word but with even more salt now) is banal and nothing summarises my conception of it better than simply being absent when if you were to just look, someone needs you to be there for them.
So my show will be shocking and intentionally so, but not in the way I originally intended or for the reasons I had previously entertained. The more revolting I can make the gruesomeness the better, and why? Because by the end of the story the audience must understand: none of the in-your-face stuff mattered. It was all misdirection. What mattered was the one horror that they - just like the protagonist - didn’t see: the suffering of a real human being who is screaming for help and nobody is listening. And that is a profoundly humane and hopefully affecting bit of narrative trickery in which violence, gore and psychopathology provide maximum contrast to the utterly mundane and undramatic lack of action that we call ‘neglect’.
There is an additional and very important twist, but I must keep some things private or no-one will get a surprise when they see the show!
Universal compassion is central to the teachings of Buddha. ‘Let you who is without sin cast the first stone’ is central to the teachings of Christ. It is the same teaching, and a lesson I believe in my foolhardy optimistic way will eventually come to be accepted by society irrespective of religious faith (but not necessarily in its absence) just because it is RIGHT.
*It is interesting to note that Cupid/Eros is the son of Venus/Aphrodite. That deserves more unpicking than I will afford it here, but don’t you think it is curious that the parent of love is the female character, the offspring the male? Cupid was depicted as an adolescent male until Victorian prudishness did away with his sex appeal altogether and turned him into a chubby baby. Venus is all woman. When I was an adolescent male my interest in love didn’t get much beyond sex, and it is a very small generalisation to suggest that that is typical. The implication is clear: women are warm, loving cuddly things perfect for popping your babies into whereas men are cheeky sex-obsessed chappies who exist just to have fun at the expense of women. Look at some depictions of Cupid pre-infantilisation and you will notice the just-fucked grin in many. In some of them the moment of the narrative chosen is when he is about to bound out of bed and leave his sleeping partner to wake up alone and probably feeling a bit used and embarrassed. Check the Jacques-Louis David painting of 1817 or the less subtle treatment of Psyche’s abandonment by François-Édouard Picot (also placed at around 1817).
The woman raises the child because she is Love. The man ejaculates and then fucks off because he is Sex. Men have all the fun while the women are left to be dutiful. Note that the anatomical Venuses are all pregnant with little wax foetuses. Venus as mother, Venus as wife, Venus as anything other than independent. Venus as object of lust for horny 18th century med students. I can’t help feeling Venus has been a bit shat upon by her own mythological meanings...
